One website I visit quite often – normally through Google searches is experts-exchange. Searches on particular programming problems seem to be a covered on many different topics at the site, and I for one have found the answer to many a tough cookie. However I have one gripe / pet hate with the site, and that is the needing to register before viewing answers. Fair enough, so you may want to increase your user base, Jeremy thinks ready for sale? and not showing answers is until you register is one way of doing that- but stop trying to prevent visitors from doing what they need to do i.e. get to the results.

Experts Exchange achieves brilliant Google results. Cloaking. i.e. Serving Google the full non hidden results, and the users something else. Not a good plan, people like me take homage to this and work out that Google’s cache is going to show the full answer – without registering. Those in the search community get pissed off at you efforts – and report you to Google for cloaking. In addition to this now they try to further obsfucate the results with CSS – probably from monitoring how many cached results are being visited in their logs – so we turn CSS off with the webmaster tools in Firefox.

As visitors we still we aren’t using the site to its full capabilities, because I for one am not going to try and browse through a site which is inside Google’s cached frame. The site is also overly graphically rich, I’ve been accustomed to the huge header graphics on EE even on a broadband connection – the only reason I keep going back, is because I know the likelyhood of getting my answer is quite high.

Another superb example of security through obscurity. Better still a brilliant concept, and what could be a brilliant resource poorly executed.

So if you are a webmaster at EE – please get rid of all this cloaking malarchy. Just provide the answers on page. Restructure the site to show the benefits of registering, and structure it more like a traditional forum. Look at the size of some of those pages absolutely huge. Get rid of the huge banner and images..see the table below for how not to do it. Its so graphically rich and slow, that pageviews must be quite low, and pages per visitor would be the same.

Connection Rate

Download Time

14.4K

215.21 seconds

28.8K

111.00 seconds

33.6K

96.12 seconds

56K

60.39 seconds

ISDN 128K

23.21 seconds

T1 1.44Mbps

8.22 seconds

In fact there’s been a bit of conversation around the web on how ridiculous this cloaking policy is.

UMMM….Th benefit of registering (which costs) is getting access to the wealth of solutions…but if you don’t have to register to see them…what benefit would you get from registering? They got to pay the bills somehow….

I can’t STAND Experts-exchange. They should re-name their site “Cash-exchange”. That’s all it is.

Several people have complained about this online; numerous have stated that the content within this site is readily available *for FREE*. Somehow they have a LOCK with Google and get top billing for all my searches. Anyway, here’s what I did:

I created a free “customized search engine” via Google. I basically included ALL root domain suffixes, and excluded experts-exchange.com, experts-exchange.org, .net, etc.

And lastly – I sent an email to the folks at EE – I wanted to see the “SOURCE” documents related to their “high ratings” from their supposed partners (Microsoft, Novell, etc.). The email I received was something like “All of them, yes”. No links were provided.

The EE folks have no interest in helping the tech community – they just want to make a boat-load of cash – at the expense of serious I.T. technologists like me (and you, if you’re reading this!)

No cloaking, no paying, all answers are available for free, asking questions is free and the layout and back end are far superior. The best answer naturally floats to the top and discussions about that answer are listed below it and ranked in a similar way. The second best answer sits just below the best answer and all the discussions about it are listed the same way as the first one. Best of all, the source code that powers the whole thing has been open-sourced so if you want to start your own experts-exchange type site on a different topic, feel free.

If experts-exchange want to cloak their content, let them. Who cares ? There are better options available now.

Holiday Management Software

Web Promotion

When it comes to mobile applications, the app stores of Google and Apple are, for most, the first port of call for critical review and helping to determine whether something is worthy of downloading. Added to that, mobile App Store SEO relies heavily on positive review scores to rank applications higher in the results, bring […]

Earlier this year Google released guidelines on how to avoid the dreaded Panda update, or indeed to help recover from it. This post examines those guidelines in detail and my thinking on the information shared by Google.

Building Deckchair – Holiday Management Software

Some of you will already be aware that my time has recently been spent been coding away on this piece of software for holiday management. It’s a lot of fun starting from scratch with absolutely nothing, and ending up with a site that has already started to serve a customer base. Here’s the 30 second elevator pitch.